The Warping of Edmund Ruffin

THEWARPINGOFEDMUNDRUFFIN Craig Simpson David F. Allmendinger. Ruffin: Family and Reform in the Old South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. xiv + 274 pp. William M. Mathew. Edmund Ruffin and the Crisis of Slavery in the Old South: The Failure ofAgricultural Reform. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988. xi + 286pp. Had the Confederacy achieved independence, we would now acknowledge its hard-eyed, silver-haired icon, Edmund Ruffin, as a father of his country. It turns out, however, that Virginia's most influential nineteenth-century agricultural reformer and secessionist radical continues to enjoy his own revenge, as these two works help us understand. Virtually everyone interested in antebellum Southern culture and politics knows of Ruffin and has studied him. One reason for his visibility is his diary, rigorously kept from 1856 until minutes before his suicide almost ten years later. 1 But Ruffin's increased accessibility to scholars and students, as both Mathew and Allmendinger make clear, comes as well from their relatively easy identification with him. Ruffin conducted systematic research, developed a significant personal library, and presented findings to his peers. He craved the extended solitude necessary for reading, reflection and composition. Indeed, he apparently preferred heroic encounters with his books to the tedium of farm supervision. These introspective qualities carried over into a fierce defense of his own work and its careful preservation, along with his correspondence and extensive memoirs. Like most academics, he had his own axes to grind. Historians and their students can look at Ruffin and see themselves. Even before the end of the eighteenth century, Virginia experienced a demographic crisis which most contemporaries traced to the twin and interrelated evils of slavery and soil exhaustion. The resulting economic and political decline preoccupied the sensitive and well-informed. Born in 1794, Ruffin came to maturity harbouring his own doubts about slavery and confronting a murky future. Marxists might sense a commitment to praxis; Weberians could observe him struggling between politics and science as vocations. But for William M. Mathew, an English scholar working within 458 Craig Simpson the rich research traditions of his nation's agricultural historiography, and aware of the voluminous and contentious modern literature on international economicdevelopment, Ruffin isjust perfect. What Mathew does, in a word, is "unpack" Ruffin's activities as agricultural reformer, emphasize his failures, and suggest a commitment to secession as following from these frustrations. Given his ambitions, Mathew's erudition provides rich and necessary context for his argument. While apologizingfor the technical detail embedded in his text, he maintains no insignificant estimate of his own achievements: "On the Ruffin reforms specifically,there has to date been no informed, extended discussion of the scientific principles underlying the proposals" (Mathew, x, 70, 200). Unlike Allmendinger, whose quarrels with other authorities incline toward the implicit, Mathew strikes a contentious and judgmental tone throughout. In the end, he attributes the failure of Southern agricultural reform in considerable measure to Ruffin's ownintellectual dishonesty. In 1813, having inherited a non-productive farm in the James River valley, Ruffin faced the prospects of poverty or migration. His efforts to resolve this unpleasant dilemma made him an agricultural reformer. Trial and error, along with careful study, particularly of Sir Humphry Davy's Elements of Agricultural Chemistry (1813), prompted the conclusion that excessivesoil acidification had ruined much of Tidewater Virginia. But by fortunate coincidence, a solution was abundantly at hand. Ruffin found that calcium-basedsediments, such as fossil or shell remains, as opposed to either animal or vegetable manures, rectified the problem. He conducted careful experiments with this fertilizer, called marl, which he summarised in his Essay on Calcareous Manures (1832). Extensive travel, largely financed by his increased farm income, popularized his proposals and led to the discovery of extensive marl beds in swamplands and river valleys along the Atlantic coast. Ruffin also advancedboth his arguments and conceits in The Fanner's Register,whichhe owned and edited from 1833to 1842. With necessary background established, Mathew's remarkable interventions commence. To provide an appropriate context for evaluating Ruffin's reforms, Mathew surveys the South's oldest agricultural chemistry. He suggests that intensive cultivation and relatively heavy rainfall had produced precisely the crisis that Ruffm observed. By testing with primitive though...